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Chapter 22: Poverty Is a Power Game

Deva Bhaskar, Correio Brasiliense, Brazil

Osho,Almost two months ago I made the interview too for Brazilian newspaper, and that interview has provoked a state of shock there. One week after the publication, the same newspaper made interviews with priests, intellectuals and homosexuals. All were against your statements. I brought some of the reactions and I would like you to comment.Father Domingos, one of the most important and progressive priests in Brazil, said, “Mr. Osho is proposing joy. Is it enough for being happy to have good house and good food? And how to liberate the spirit?”He is also saying that you don’t have good informations and that you don’t know the work of the church with the poor, and especially the pope’s statement which says, “Wherever is private property there is human misery, and the church have to fight against it.”

There are so many things in that statement.

First, the church has private properties. So what the nonsense he is talking about? The first thing the churches should do, they should disown private properties if they mean business. Otherwise this is bullshit.

Rome has the most richest private ownership than anybody else, and pope is the head of the biggest private empire. What kind of service they are doing to the poor? They are creating poverty in the world. Being against birth control, being against abortion, being against the pill, they are creating poverty, more population than the earth is capable to support. This is the service to the poor?

You create the poor and then you serve the poor.

In the first place, why create the poor? There is no need for poverty in the world. If the church drops its stupidity against birth control methods, the poverty can disappear. But they would not drop that. Not that any spiritual thing is involved in it, but for the simple reason that if there are not poor people, whom they are going to convert into Christianity? Whom they are going to make Catholics?

They need orphans, they need beggars, they need starving people because only they can be converted.

In India I have looked for almost half a century for a single rich man who has been converted to Christianity. I have not found. All the people who have been converted to Christianity are the poor people.

Poverty is their whole game - power game. Greater the number, bigger is their power. It is simply the politics of numbers.